use LinkedIn Company Pages to see for yourself). There are so many demand gen vendors out there, and if you are a demand gen professional in sales or marketing, we've probably called you. Outsourcing some or all of your appointment setting or lead generation activity to a third party vendor is a task that shouldn't be undertaken by responding to one cold call. Words of wisdom from two industry leaders: Trish Bertuzzi, Inside Sales Expert , @bridgegroupinc : "Hiring a third party lead gen vendor is like dating… the chemistry is either there or it is not. How many reps do you have? MORE >>

LinkedIn Groups. Be it Facebook, twitter, LinkedIn Groups, or your blog. I was fortunate enough to be asked by Gerhard Gschwandtner , of Selling Power to speak this week at his Sales Leadership Conference in Philadelphia. The highlight of my day was listening to Seth Godin, blogger and author on topics b2b sales and marketing folks devour. One part of Seth's talk was on building a tribe. Not sure I've got the quote verbatim, but basically he was saying "marketers that build tribes of loyal prospects and customers will win." happen to be a member of that tribe. Create buzz. Be hip. MORE >>

Add to that their annual Inside Sales Metrics and Compensation reports and Bridge's Inside Sales Experts LinkedIn group , and you've got yourself some really fine resources to improve your team. Inbound Marketing is all the rage these days, and why shouldn't it be? It works, right? At least, that's what HubSpot clients are saying (and we're clients, so I can vouch for it). Inbound Marketing's goal is to pull potential customers in by all different methods, whether it's compelling content, savvy SEO execution or community interaction via social media. Where do you turn? Great stuff. MORE >>

Sounded like a LinkedIn Poll to me. This past week a prospect commented that she wanted to explore a third-party lead gen program because their sales reps were spending too much time prospecting and not selling. She said that if they had enough leads they would be SELLING and CLOSING -- not having to do lead gen. How many sales reps are caught in the prospecting grind and not closing? The results seem to make sense, right? About half the people spend somewhere between one and two days a week doing lead gen. Wrong. But salespeople shouldn't be the ones generating the leads. What is your MORE >>

The process: Send business cards to Green Leads, wait a week Leads are returned in spreadsheet format Leads can be imported into Outlook, LinkedIn, Salesforce or other CRM or Marketing Automation systems Business cards are returned or recycled To celebrate all the networking, business card exchanges and great relationship building that will happen at Dreamforce this week, Green Leads is offering a limited version of the service to non-clients for FREE. How many business cards do you have laying around in one of the current states? On your desktop in a pile 2. Wrapped in a rubber band 3. MORE >>